Page 219 - Sport Culture and the Media

200 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

England captain Danny Meehan, played by Vinnie Jones, redeems himself after
‘throwing’ a match and thus having, as one inmate complains, ‘sold out his
country’. The spoof documentary Mike Bassett: England Manager (2001) is the
story of an incompetent lower league manager (played by Ricky Tomlinson)
who gets the job only because better qualified candidates have been deterred
from taking it by the ferocity of the English tabloid press. Soon, the tabloids call
him ‘The Most Hated Man in Britain’, but after the mandatory unlikely win
under pressure (which also occurs in Mean Machine) another declares ‘Bassett’s
face found on a Shroud’. Cameos by Martin Bashir (noted most recently for his
documentary on Michael Jackson) and legendary players Pele and Ronaldo
enhance its comic realism. In the USA, sport and proto-sport are still popular
subjects for film, including violent, futuristic treatments of gladiatorial com-
petition in Futuresport (1998) and the remake of Rollerball (2001), in which
the ‘world’s most dangerous game’ is played out in post-Cold War ‘Central
Asia’ (and in which Any Given Sunday’s LL Cool J also appears). Sports
drama (often made for television) is a stock screen genre, with remakes like
Brian’s Song (2001), ‘real life’ fictional treatments like Rudy (1993) and ‘gritty’
narratives like Varsity Blues (1999) regularly telling the story of sportsmen
triumphing against the odds (with the occasional sportswoman in such films
as A League of Their Own (1992)). The sports film has a tendency to traverse
the boundaries of the real and the mythic. During the presidency of Ronald
Reagan, for example, he sometimes reprised his role as the heroic but tragic
footballer George Gipp in Knute Rockne, All American (1940), calling on the
citizenry to ‘Win one for the Gipper’. Whether in fantasy or naturalistic form,
the fictional sports film still finds a prominent place in the media sports cultural
complex, linking live TV texts, journalism, biography and literature, and
making it harder still to find cultural space free of sport.

Conclusion: ‘there’s always the sport’

The above discussion of sport in fictional film demonstrates its richness as
a source of mythologies, allegories and narratives. The rise and fall of the
‘standard’ sports career lends itself particularly well to narrative film. In a short
time-span there are exultant and despairing moments, with the inevitability of
athletic decline and the likelihood of personal trauma offering many emotional
possibilities to be exploited. The seeds of the filmic treatment of sport,
however, are already present in sports television, which as argued earlier has
an affinity with melodrama both in its presentation and reception. In sports
films melodrama tends to be formative, while in live sports TV the action is
taken as the material out of which melodrama can be made. This does not